sex.web.net

Where am I?

We all follow a traditional narrative of gender roles that is difficult to break out of. This is especially true when it comes to issues surrounding the family and reproduction. Who of us have not heard that declining fertility rates have to do with women waiting too long to have children? The 35 year-old woman who is seeking fertility treatment receives silent judgment from others. She waited too long. It’s kinda her fault because she focused too much on her education and career at the expense of having children, right? Women continue to be blamed for their infertility. In a recent interview with Liza Mundy, author of “Everything Conceivable” in Salon, Mundy states that “although men are now half or more of infertility patients, there's been so little conversation about this -- and yet so much conversation around the use of technology by women -- older mothers, egg donors.”

Mundy explains that it’s only a small subset of fertility patients who are women over 38. And nobody is talking about the reasons why women today are conceiving at later ages and later ages -- unwilling partners, partners who don't exist yet, the misconceived desire to find the perfect Other (the myths of romantic love), financial reasons, bosses who actively discourage women from childbearing. What else? And yet there's this assumption that women suffering from fertility problems have just "decided" to wait. They brought this upon themselves.

In a documentary I watched a couple of months back called “Lovable” (which recently premiered at Hot Docs), Canadian documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig explores the yearnings for the romantic myths of our culture and the difficulty of finding and sustaining relationships. At one point in the film, Zweig, who is an older, single man longing for a relationship and children, reveals his sadness that several of the women in his life had abortions. He could have been a father – several times by now. It was a powerful point in the film partly because we never hear this story. It’s as if men aren’t part of this dialogue, this narrative surrounding fertility and reproduction. Where are the media stories about men who want to conceive a child but can't?  Where are the media stories about men who regret their partner's abortions?

Women get to control their fertility – no questions asked - but equality also means that we include men in this important, life-alterning narrative and stop blaming women for infertility problems.